CONNECTICUT CLOSEUP: BRANFORD

PAGES COVE, off the Branford coast, is part of the Connecticut Water Trails system.

PAGES COVE, off the Branford coast, is part of the Connecticut Water Trails system. (RICK HARTFORD|rhartford@courant.com)

Tina Bachetti

HOW IT GOT ITS NAME: The area was known as Totoket, or "Tidal River," when it was purchased from the Mattabesec Indians by settlers from New Haven in 1638. It was named Branford in 1653, after the English town of Brentford in Middle-sex County. It was set oB from New Haven as a separate town in 1685.

DID YOU KNOW? The 450-acre Stony Creek Quarry Preserve on the Branford/Guilford line was once a quarry bustling with hundreds of immigrant workers in the late 1800s. Stony Creek pink granite, estimated to be 600 million years old, was used in the Statue of Liberty's base, Grand Central Terminal in New York, the Brooklyn Bridge, the piers of the George Washington Bridge, South Station in Boston, and Grant's Tomb. The town now owns the land and leases a quarry on the site to Stony Creek Quarry Corp.

NOTABLE RESIDENTS: Ted Kennedy Jr., son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy; Henry Lee, the noted forensic scientist; and Thomas Steitz, a 2009 Nobel laureate in chemistry. Bob DuPuy, former president and COO of Major League Baseball, grew up in Branford.